Where the rubber hits the road

Following on from my posting about how much of an impact blogs are likely to have on PR, it occurred to me that whilst people talk about the technological aspect of services and how they change the media landscape; but not how this impacts from a sociological point-of-view. There is the generational gap of digital natives versus digital immigrants where digital immigrants have only known the world with the Internet as a source of information and and communications. Secondly there is the sociological generation gap between baby-boomers, generation x and generation y.They have different aspirations and ways of working. Generation y would be digital natives, but it is also factors like they didn’t live through the cold war, or that women’s rights is accepted as norm which changes the way they look at the world, interact with each other and use information.

Generation y are seen as being more group centric than baby-boomers and generation x as more pragmatic than the existential boomers.

If one overlays this on web services you can see how the ‘ego-centric’ nature of blogging would fit quite nicely for boomers and its comments section allows rigorous debates that generation x love, whereas services like MySpace would fit better with the consensus, high touch and collective nature of generation y.

MySpace the service, will probably wane rather like Friendster before it, mainly because social software still has a lot of learnings to do and services to refine.

For instance, I have not been able accept a friend invite from Drew B, and an example of bad user experience design is the way I have to go and pick up mail from MySpace rather than have it drop into my email account.

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2 Replies to “Where the rubber hits the road”

Yeah MySpace is really buggy and clunky. Surely something else could do the job better! But could it build up such a massive number of users? I don’t think MySpace will wane too quick, much in the same way hotmail didn’t for a long time. We’ll see huh!

I love this article. I have been doing alot of research into how generation Y will change business, and how they are already changing business as we know it — and the oldest of these folks is about 24!

I do have some issues with the delineating nature in which these generations are supposedly different from each other. I am generation x. But the descriptors of generation x sound nothing like me. Generation y sounds 90% accurate to who I am — with the exception that I have a much longer attention span and I can’t stand text messaging.

And I love blogging — but I only post my blog on MySpace — which I also love. I’m also finding that perhaps a missing variable in your essay is the use of social software like MySpace that businesses are doing. My local bar posts itself as a MySpace page, with pictures of the patrons addorning the page. The owner behind the bar is the profile picture. Since he posted the myspace page — he has doubled in business.

I think what we are seeing is part of the inevitable evolution of the human race. We are like cells, slowly organizing into organs that can provide a higher function. A molecular organization that forms naturally. This, I believe is our future. The network is still very much in its infancy — and I doubt the internet as we know it will be the last or best vehicle for communicating. But for now — it is absolutely revolutionary — and its so exciting to be alive.